FILM INTERVIEW: MICHAEL SHEEN
Star of 'The Damned United' Talks Sports, Leadership, Courage & Future Projects
Before I kick off this interview, let me make a me a cuppa. I know nothing about English soccer (or football, as the rest of the world calls it). Nor do I give a damn about sports in particular. But a good sports movie — now that’s a different subject, and The Damned United is a pretty great one, as it depicts the cinema-honored cliché of a determined coach taking his team to the top through grit, determination and no small use of salty language.
That’s what ex-player and manager Brian Clough did at first with Derby County, taking a screwed-up team to a European Cup win. It was a victory that allowed him to take the managing post of his long-time rival team Leeds United. Sure, they may have been Britain’s top-ranked players when Brian had a go at them, but it only took 44 days of Clough’s “inspiration” to run the champions into the ground. Some rejoiced…but for those who thought it was a bump before greatness, Clough would be labeled “the greatest manager England never had.”
As for actor Michael Sheen, he’s never had a problem carrying through on the promise of alternately slick and commanding characters. Witness his spiteful knight in Kingdom of Heaven, the somewhat smarmy interviewer of Frost/Nixon, the werewolf-styled Spartacus of three Underworld pictures and a vampire ruler in the forthcoming Twilight sequel New Moon, and you’ll know that Sheen is a take-charge kind of actor. He makes one of his best runs of it as Brian Clough, a rough-and-tumble role that’s been tailor-fit for Sheen by scripter Peter Morgan, who helped give Sheen a star-making performance as politico Tony Blair in The Queen.
Morgan has given Sheen’s new real-life character in The Damned United a bad behavior accessibility that any audience can appreciate, and leave it to Sheen to make Brian a magnetic, mangily likable loudmouth on and off the playing ground, especially in his lovably abusive relationship with coach Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall). With any number of hilarious invectives against management and a belief in his own questionable method of leadership, Sheen’s Clough makes for one of the most charismatic sport-comedy performances since Paul Newman tried to hold his hockey team together in Slap Shot. That film may have been set on the ice, but it shares an anarchic spirit that translates well into any country’s favorite sport.
The Damned United, which hit theaters October 9th, is only the opening kick in a flurry of performances that will propel the chameleon-like Sheen to the top of his game. Thousands of screaming teenage girls will likely descend on him when he segues from Lucian in the Underworld saga to the even more insanely popular Twilight franchise’s red-eyed vampire ruler Aro. And that’s to say nothing of the onslaught Sheen will get from the even more tilted Tron fan-base when the actor plays on the souped-up game grid of Tron Legacy. But before Tron hits at the end of next year, Sheen will transform into The White Rabbit of Tim Burton’s manic reinvention of Alice in Wonderland. Indeed, Sheen might be the hardest-working and most versatile English actor to hit these shores since Michael Caine showed he could play a spy as well as a cad.
Sunnily effusive and without a hint of the slick malevolence he can do so well, Michael Sheen sips tea as he expounds on what it takes to both lose and win as the most notorious man to ever hit the English soccer field, as well as playing the indie and franchise tent poles of the Hollywood game.
Daniel Schweiger: One of the best things about The Damned United is how it’s about a lot more than soccer. Do you think, in that way, a “sports” movie needs to appeal to audiences beyond what it’s about on the surface?
Michael Sheen: In the buildup to making the film, we obviously thought a lot about films that had been about football in some way — specifically football in Britain — but they never really work, and we were trying to figure out why that was. Ultimately, I think one of the things is that the even though football might be dramatic to watch in a stadium, that experience doesn’t translate to watching it on a movie screen. A good example of how we solved it comes in a moment in Damned United where there’s a caption that just says the score and it gets a big laugh. That’s because I’ve just done this big motivational speech, we run out, and suddenly it’s “Leeds: 2, Derby: 0.” The Damned United works because it’s humor, and the drama is always about Brian’s relationship with the teams he manages. He’s an entertaining, compelling and charismatic man whom the audience wants to take a journey with. It’s adapted from the book by David Piece, which has 44 chapters about Leeds but always with a flashback to Derby. There was a time when we considered doing the film chronologically, which would just have been a real bummer to watch, as everything that starts going great ends up badly. So we’ve structured The Damned United to have a lot of fun and layers of meaning in how it flashes forward and backward, especially in how the events with Derby and Leeds echo and subvert one another.
DS: The Damned United defies a lot of “sports movie” clichés in that way. Usually, you have the coach who comes in to save the underdog team, which Brian does here at first with Derby. Then he tries the same thing with a team that isn’t an underdog, and screws them up completely with his tactics.
MS: Yes, The Damned United is completely the opposite of a film like Hoosiers, where you have these “hero” coach characters. Sure, they’re colorful, but they tend to have a humility of some kind. They’re the person you want to root for. Clough really challenges that perception in lots of ways, and another thing we had to work out was how to balance between being true to whom he was without alienating the audience. We wanted them to like him, even though Brian makes that difficult at times — like that first day at Leeds when he says, “You won it all by cheating and you can throw it all away.” Now that’s not what you want in a normal sports film. You want the hero to come in and give a heartfelt speech. Sure, the players might all hate him at first, but that changes when he starts to turn them around. Well, that never happens in this film! Brian never turns Leeds around. They hate him in the beginning and they hate him at the end. It’s interesting to see how that affects someone who’s winning, and having people who are completely and totally loyal to him like the players were at Derby. Leeds — they just weren’t going to go there.
DS: While Leeds might hate Brian Clough, the audience really loves him by the end of the film.
MS: I hope so. Brian is sort of like a British folk hero in a way. He came from working class origins and decided, for whatever reason, to take on the brass button. Brian tells Derby’s owner, “You stick to writing the checks and I’ll get on with the football.” That’s not just true of sports, is it? It’s true of people who actually do the work, who understand the nuts and bolts of their business and are in direct opposition to the owners. Brian Clough had pretensions of socialism that the players and managers should actually have control over the sport, and that’s why I think he was always trying to wrestle control away from people who were put in the positions of authority.
DS: Do you think The Damned United is also a “love” story in Brian’s dysfunctional relationship with his coach Peter Taylor?
MS: We’ve always thought of their relationship as a marriage while making the film, especially with the number of times you see me kissing Peter’s character in the film. But obviously, we weren’t making it a homosexual story. The Damned United is more about the intimacy between two men. There’s that bit where I start singing “Love and Marriage,” and you think I’m beckoning for my wife to come and dance with me, but actually I’m beckoning over to Peter Taylor! There’s lots of that all the way through the film, where you’ve got this kind of “marriage.” And in any marriage, there’s always the potential for resentment. I feel like both Clough and Taylor felt like they needed and depended on each other, but they also wanted to prove that they could do it without the other person — or at least Clough felt that way. I think the fact that he went to Leeds without Peter was part of his downfall. Then, when Brian’s “fever” breaks and his obsession with Leeds has run its course, he goes back to his “wife” and asks for forgiveness. Brian says, “Baby, baby take me back,” to Peter at the end. That kind of stuff is very consciously in there.
DS: There’s a great bit when Brian gets an “ambush” interview. It’s almost similar to what your David Frost put Nixon through.
MS: My very first research for The Damned United was the day after we finished filming Frost/Nixon. I went on YouTube, and the first thing that came up was Clough being interviewed by David Frost! That was very peculiar for me because I’d just played that character. There was a time when the interview with Frost was going to be in United, and I said that I wanted to play him as well! Being on the other side of things was certainly interesting.
DS: Peter Morgan has written for you as Tony Blair in The Deal, The Queen and The Special Relationship, as well as for your David Frost in Frost/Nixon, yet it’s his non-political script for The Damned United which might be his most accessible script for you.
MS: It’s interesting, in a way, because Brian’s character also reflects the ambitious, witty, media-savvy David Frost, while he also has shades of the monstrous, self-destructive and blind-spotted Nixon character. And I relish that, especially because there’s a “simplicity” to this film that allows for a more accessible experience.
DS: If there’s one sports movie that The Damned United reminded me of in a great way, it would be Slap Shot, where’s there’s a similar brawl between players and management.
MS: Slap Shot is a great movie. I’ve even got a t-shirt with the Hanson Brothers on it. When I first watched Slap Shot, I remember I was quite disturbed by the blood, and the physical down and dirty in the changing rooms had a kind of a reality to it. So I think you’re right in that The Damned United has the same kind of grim humor to it — the feeling of what it’s really like to be on a team.
DS: You really transform yourself from role to role. On that note, I think you did a terrific job when the Underworld series spotlighted Lucian for Evolution, which, for me, is the best film of the series. Now there’s going to be another one. It’s almost unimaginable that your character is going stay dead. Have they worked out ways for Lucian to resurrect himself?
MS: Nobody from Underworld has made any contact with me. I’ve just heard about the new film through rumors and stuff. In any case, I can’t imagine getting myself in that kind of shape again! I’m not getting any younger, and it was hard work playing a young Lucian for Underworld. I’d love for them to find a little loophole so that I could be the same character but older. I’d love to be an old, grizzled, white-haired werewolf!
DS: Do you think it’s because of Lucian battling vampires in the Underworld films that they cast you as a bloodsucker in New Moon?
MS: It’s a bit of a mystery why they did cast me in New Moon. I know the director, Chris Weitz, said that he was a big fan of Lucian’s. Maybe they were hoping I’d bring a few of the Underworld fans over. I’m just glad they cast me because Aro is a great character, and I’ve earned a lot of points with my daughter for playing him!
DS: You might be popular in Underworld, but it might be a whole other experience having 1,000 of your daughter’s screaming friends come running after you in the street!
MS: Yeah, I know. Everyone in her school knows that her dad is playing Aro and she says she gets a lot of attention on the schoolyard now because of that. We’ll wait and see what happens. I’m waiting in anticipation for the decibel level of the premiere because I’ve been told about the level of Twilight‘s fan-base. I feel like people probably won’t recognize me from the film, though. That’s been one of the good things about transforming myself through lots of different characters. It’s given me a certain level of anonymity up until now, although that’s been changing. I thought I was going to get away with Aro because he’s got the long black hair and the red eyes, but I was buying these jeans in the store yesterday, coming out of the dressing room, when I saw this woman standing in front of me. She was shaking, going, “You’re Aro!” I didn’t look particularly vampiric as I was walking out of there, so I thought, “Alright, there’s going to be a lot more of that.”
DS: Tron might be the Twilight of my generation. Was it like that for you?
MS: I love that film! I’d never seen anything like Tron. Just the look of the characters and that weird mixture of silent era-looking cinema and futuristic computer effects…and I just loved being inside a computer game, which were just these “bloop” tennis things before Tron came out. To be honest, I’ve watched Tron many, many times. While I think that the “real world” in the film has dated quite a bit, the stuff in the Tron world hasn’t dated at all. I still find it just as amazing to watch. Being in Tron Evolution was just a great experience. I loved it.
DS: I also can’t wait to see how you play The White Rabbit in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.
MS: I had to sign my first autograph on a photograph of The White Rabbit the other day, and made a joke that this is the first “real” transformation I’ve done because the character is all CGI animation, so it’s not like I had to don the rabbit suit, although I would’ve loved to. I supplied the voice, and they filmed me moving a little bit just to get some basic actions. It’s going to be as much of a surprise for me to watch Alice in Wonderland as it will be to everyone else.
DS: After starring in so many big franchise pictures, do you want the makers of smaller pictures like The Damned United to know it’s okay to still approach you?
MS: The next film I am doing is here in LA and it’s called The Beautiful Boy. I’m acting in it for three weeks for almost no money, since it’s a tiny little independent picture. But I read the script and just thought it was beautifully written, really original, fresh and totally unsentimental. It’s always going to be like that for me because, first and foremost, if I read a script that’s compelling and interesting, I’ll do it. It doesn’t matter if it’s loads of money, no money, in Britain or America. I’ll be in the production because I want to have the experience when I read it that the audience will have when they watch the film.
DS: We might have David Beckham, but his sport is still far from a household name. Do you think English football — or soccer, as we call it — is ever going to catch on here?
MS: Pele also couldn’t do it, and if the two most glamorous people ever in the footballing world can’t do it, then I doubt it will happen. I think the problem is that you’ve already got your sports over here. You’ve got your baseball and your American football and your basketball and ice hockey. I think the sports that countries take to their hearts describes who its people are. Sports almost becomes like the history of the country. You can see that in a fantastic Ken Burns documentary called Baseball. In the same way that baseball is the history of America, I think the history of football is the history of Britain. Sports is a lot about memory that we bind ourselves together by. You remember where were you when England lost in penalties to Germany in the World Cup in the same way that Americans would recall their favorite World Series game. There’s all kinds of stuff that goes with it, so I don’t think our football is ever going to quite translate like that.
Special thanks to Nancy Bishop and Venice Magazine.
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